No, @TracyBethHoeg, the article you point to does not claim delta is not "resulting in increased rates of in-school transmission”. In fact, it says the opposite. 🧵
Speaking of the 12 presumed cases of in-school transmission for the summer, the article offers this: "By way of comparison, the district reported 2 cases of apparant transmission during the regular school year." latimes.com/california/sto…
In fact, the article very explicitly implicates Delta in the rise of infections.
Regarding infections generally, the article reports 20 infections for the first week, increasing to 59 the final week for a total of 174 infections over the 5 weeks summer period.
In terms of rates, the article states that over the summer, general infection rates went from 1 in 1,000 to 6 in 1,000.
What's more, the article makes clear the involvement of mitigation in the somewhat surprising containment of Delta.
Yet despite the article, despite the preponderance of evidence pointing to the importance of mitigation, when @TracyBethHoeg is confronted in the replies about the role of mitigation in the summer program's control of Delta she says, "just can't say what amount if any they made"
A line which itself is almost straight out of "Merchants of Doubt" because the strategy of the denier is not to offer evidence but to raise doubt as if you "just can't say" whether mitigation makes a difference.
But of course, we can say, there's endless evidence mitigation makes a difference yet here @KrugAlli and @tracyhoeg go on as if none of it makes a difference because, why not just ignore everything else and make you case based on an outlier, Denmark?
Which Denmark, by the way, currently has five times as many cases as Germany and is the leader in cases amongst its neighbors. But sure, that's the way to go.
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.@ShiraDoronMD et al argue against universal masking in healthcare based on 2 claims: 1) transmission risk from HCWs w/out symptoms is low 2) vaccination is sufficienly protective against hospital-acquired infection.
These claims are both knowably, provably wrong.
@AnnalsofIM
🧵
To establish their first claim, that the risk of transmission from HCWs without symptoms is low, the authors cite two sources: a) Killingley and b) Tayyar.
But a) Killingley does NOT show presymptomatic transmission risk is small. What Killingley actually shows is that, what the authors pass off as "minimal presymptomatic shedding," is consistent with **44% of transmission occuring presymptomatically**.
In honor of @TracyBethHoeg’s new anti-mask propaganda/preprint, I compiled her Tweets on mask studies into a textbook I’m calling, “Confounders: A Matter of Convenience.” It’s an expose of Hoeg’s bad faith hypocrisy. 🧵
Here’s the title page with a table of contents.
CHAPTER I:
HOW TO PROTEST PRO-MASK STUDIES
It's easy! Just complain the conclusion doesn’t hold because the data is confounded! 1. Eg. The Boston Mask Study
The moral panic over school closures has left us with problems more intractable than they were pre-pandemic because now, to solve those problems, we first have to dispel lies. That school is a preventative to suicide is a reprehensible distortion, but it is not the only one. 🧵
There is the hysteria over how closures hurt minorities the most which obscures that, for minorities, school is the source of a problem: the school-to-prison pipeline. nytimes.com/2020/10/28/opi…
There is the hysteria that closures are causing obesity which obscures the problem of fatty, nutritionally bankrupt cafeteria food. nypost.com/2019/11/16/the…
Following a lead in @mehdirhasan's receipt-riddled expose, I looked into FL's deadly summers but in terms of excess deaths (Hasan uses C0VID deaths) in the 10 US states with the highest percentage of seniors. Tl;dr: DeSantis won't be using these stats on the campaign trail. 🧵
The long list of concerns downplayers coopted for the sake of opening schools and then quickly abandoned: learning loss that didn't carry over to C0VID related cognitive declines, newsinfo.inquirer.net/1639956/omicro…
Shenoy et al urge abandoning universal masking on the grounds masks have little benefit & some harm. Yesterday I showed they're wrong about benefits. Today I show they're wrong about harms. Their strongest evidence favors masks. The rest has little relation to their ambitions. 🧵
In making the case that masks harm, the authors use three sources.
In Cormier et al patients & providers rate their masked & unmasked encounters in terms of communication difficulties. Using scales from 1-5 (patients) or from 1-6 (providers) participants are asked about eg. listening effort, ability to connect, understand & recall.